Going To Extremes

American Demographics, June 1, 2002

Byline: JOAN RAYMOND

Andrew Royal isn't your typical couch potato. The 26-year-old from Cleveland, who works two jobs to finance his new mortgage payments, rarely sits glued to the tube - even when his hometown team, the Cleveland Browns, is playing on Monday Night Football. But when the X Games or the Gravity Games are on, Royal not only makes time to watch, he actually schedules his day around what's on TV. "These athletes are so on the edge that it actually makes watching TV enjoyable," says Royal, who hung up his skis more than 10 years ago in favor of a snowboard. "Extreme sports are my Monday Night Football."

For those who still think a half pipe is something you light up, wake up and smell the Mountain Dew. Extreme sports, once considered the sole province of the multi-pierced, tattooed slacker, have entered the mainstream. These high-intensity, individualistic sports, which involve everything from the ultra-hip snowboarding to Moto-X (a strange, scary contest that has motorcyclists attempt ski jumps) have encroached upon traditional sports - especially group sports - in popularity. While Monday Night Football, for example, has recently struggled for an audience, viewership has steadily increased each year for such sports events as the X Games on ESPN and the Gravity Games on NBC. "These new sports are an authentic slice of the wider youth culture and not just a fad," says Harvey Lauer, president of American Sports Data, Inc. (ASD), a sports marketing research company in Hartsdale, N.Y.

This youth culture consists of some 58 million Americans between the ages of 10 and 24. Horizon Media Research in New York City estimates this group's annual buying power at more than $250 billion. That's one reason why giants such as PepsiCo, AT&T Broadband, Motorola, Ford and Morningstar Foods - and even the U.S. Marines - have focused a chunk of their marketing budgets on capturing the elusive Gen X and Gen Y male consumers, who make up the bulk of extreme sports aficionados. PepsiCo's Mountain Dew, for example, has been a sponsor of the X Games, widely considered the Olympics of the extreme sports world, and the Gravity Games. (American Demographics' corporate parent, PRIMEDIA, is part owner of the Gravity Games.)

Introduced in the 1960s, Mountain Dew was perceived as a hillbilly drink, says Dave DeCecco, spokesman for PepsiCo. That changed in 1992, when "Do the Dew" was born. The edgy ads, showing people engaged in various extreme activities, made Mountain Dew the fastest-growing soft drink of the 1990s. "The involvement was a natural extension of our advertising," DeCecco says. PepsiCo reports that the number of teens who said "Mountain Dew is a brand for someone like me" increased 10 percentage points between 1998 and 2001.

In an otherwise anemic sports-viewing market, extreme sports have a hardy following. Although they can't match the numbers of Monday Night Football, ratings for the X Games and Gravity Games are rising - albeit from a much smaller base. Monday Night Football is one of the strongest sports broadcasting franchises, often ranking among the top 10 prime-time programs. But the show's standing has been declining for several years: Ratings for the ABC staple fell to an average of 12.7 percent of the nation's 100-million plus homes with televisions in 2000, and then fell to 11.5 percent in 2001, according to Nielsen Media Research. By contrast, the 2001 Gravity Games, held in Providence, R.I., averaged a 1.7 household rating - which corresponds to about 2 million households - up from 1.6 in 2000. The Winter X Games VI held in Aspen, Colo., earlier this year, resulted in record viewership for ESPN and ESPN2: The telecast on February 3, 2 p.m. Eastern time, on ESPN, scored a 1.04 rating (894,640 households), making it the highest-rated and most-watched Winter X Games telecast ever on the network. (The sports network has been televising the X Games for seven years.) Last year, the Summer X Games VII, in Philadelphia, also posted increases. In an X Games record, the 2001 event attracted an average audience of 465,905, an increase of 48 percent over the prior year.

Moreover, the demos are young and male - an elusive target group for most marketers. The 2001 Gravity Games, for instance, attracted more male viewers, 18 to 34, than any other action sports program. Among males ages 12 to 17, the Gravity Games drew a 1.7 household rating, corresponding to more than 200,000 male teens, up from 1.2 in 2000. Among males ages 12 to 24, the games drew a 1.3 rating, nearly 320,000 males, up from 1.1 in 2000. Last year's Summer X Games had some big air too: Within the 12- to 17-year-old demographic, ratings were up 86 percent (to 0.93 from 0.50), about 219,000 boys and girls, while numbers for males ages 12 to 17 were up 72 percent (to 1.48 from 0.86), about 178,000 boys. Within the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic, ratings were up 40 percent, nearly 330,000 young men (to 1.05 from 0.75). Compare those demos with baseball's median age of 46.4 or even ESPN's total-day median age of 40.7.